Berkeley Lab Search

An experiment conducted at Berkeley Lab has demonstrated, for the first time, electronic switching in an exotic, ultrathin material that can carry a charge with nearly zero loss at room temperature. Researchers demonstrated this switching when subjecting the material to a low-current electric field.

A research team has found the first evidence that a shaking motion in the structure of an atomically thin material possesses a naturally occurring circular rotation that could become the building block for a new form of information technology and molecular-scale machines.

In what may provide a potential path to processing information in a quantum computer, researchers have switched an intrinsic property of electrons from an excited state to a relaxed state on demand using a device that served as a microwave “tuning fork.”

Scientists have simplified the steps to create highly efficient silicon solar cells by applying a new mix of materials to a standard design. The special blend of materials eliminates the need for a process known as doping that steers the device’s properties by introducing foreign atoms. Doping can also degrade performance.

An important step towards next-generation ultra-compact photonic and optoelectronic devices has been taken with the realization of a two-dimensional excitonic laser. Berkeley Lab researchers have embedded a monolayer of tungsten disulfide into a microdisk resonator to achieve bright excitonic lasing at visible light wavelengths.

Berkeley Lab researchers have produced the first atomically thin 2D sheets of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites. These ionic materials exhibit optical properties not found in 2D covalent semiconductors such as graphene, making them promising alternatives to silicon for future electronic devices.

Working at the Molecular Foundry, Berkeley Lab researchers used their “Campanile” nano-optical probe to make some surprising discoveries about molybdenum disulfide, a member of the “transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) semiconductor family whose optoelectronic properties hold great promise for future nanoelectronic and photonic devices.